Reliability and Lifetime Maximization of Wireless Sensor Networks: Modelling, Evaluation and Validation

Abstract

Transmission range and constrained energy sources are the two most important fundamental limitations of sensor networks which evaluates their lifetime. The factors such as data transmission capacity, transmission strategy, and lifetime contribute in evaluating the performance of wireless sensor networks. The number of sensor nodes, area of operation, transmission distances, information routing, energy consumption and network topology are the other factors that define network lifetime. These factors and parameters are analytically important as they become significant towards the most favorable design strategies and they also define the networks scalability, feasibility and reliability. Distances between node to node and node to sink must be optimized to derive maximum network lifetime.The proposed methodology uses the most favorable distances (MFD) approach for energy-efficiency and energy-balance such as to get minimum energy consumption phenomenon leading to network lifetime maximization. A heuristic ACO algorithm which uses control parameters (alpha, beta), evaporation rate, heuristic information, and pheromone updating finds the shortest path on a probability basis. The referred literature is full of such assumptions and algorithms but, this work can be seen as an extension with added simulations. The work presents result validations under MATLAB environment as per the theoretical and mathematical aspects considered. Based upon this an application oriented work is to be carried out and the work will be published in due course of time.